Portland State’s ‘first’ garden

Portland State President Wim Wiewel and his wife, Alice, welcomed a new addition to their front yard this past Saturday. And it came in the perfect color: green.

A group of Portland State graduate students transformed a stale, grassy landscape in Wiewel’s front yard into a sustainable, or permaculture, food garden.

Students Erik Blender, Sion Zivetz, Sarah Horn and Julia Pierson, who are involved in the Portland State sustainability certificate program, took it upon themselves to turn their class project into a tradition. 

What began as a project requirement for the sustainability certificate turned into a promising step forward for the ushering in of a new president, and hopefully a new era of a greener Portland State, Blender said.

The students worked closely with Alice Wiewel to create a garden that fit her family’s lifestyle. The Wiewels provided the students with a food list, and the two helped with the final installation on Saturday.
 
“We were pretty fortunate that Alice Wiewel is an architect,” Zivetz said. “We didn’t have all the right tools but she had all the right ideas for how to go about it.”

The team focused on permaculture gardening ideas such as companion planting, where complementary plants are bedded side by side to aid each other’s growth, sometimes with opposite growing seasons, Zivetz said.

“We are stacking in place and time,” Blender said. “So then a strawberry is not just a strawberry.”

The main focus of the project was to create a space that will reduce the home’s waste and carbon footprint.
In the past, mulch had been driven to and from the property with each planting season, which was wasting fuel, Blender explained.

The garden now has on-site composting, as well as irrigation trenches to divert rainwater from the roof into the soil, helping to reduce waste.

The group hopes that this project will take on a life of its own, and provide future students with opportunities for innovations.